Inviting Humans to Sprout Wings and Soar

By JAMES GORMAN

Published: April 15, 2003

It's one thing to know birds, another to join the flock in the air. Some scientific consultants on the film "Winged Migration," a documentary on the great travels of birds, had the chance to fly with the creatures they study on an ultralight aircraft that was the moviemakers' primary tool.

Jacques Perrin, the French producer and director of the movie, who speaks English with a certain poetic license and an accent reminiscent of Jacques Cousteau, said that when scientists landed, they were speechless. "They don't say so splendid words," he said with a light in his eyes. "They cry."

That's easy to believe. Even a viewer in the theater has to be moved by the almost palpable presence of birds in flight. You can see the flight muscles of the Greylag geese, hear their breathing and their calls, see them in their element thousands feet above the ground and just a few feet away from the camera. An ornithologist who did this in reality would need a heart of stone to return to earth with dry eyes.

"Winged Migration," which was nominated for an Academy Award for documentary feature, is, like Mr. Perrin's English, more poetic than precise, with minimal narration and music that sometimes threatens to soar off into the stratosphere.

But the images of birds, gained over four years by more than a dozen cinematographers, are simply astonishing. (The film opens in New York on Friday at the Paris Theater; other dates and locations can be found online at www.sonyclassics.com /wingedmigration/home.html.)

Mr. Perrin said an ultralight aircraft modified to hold a pilot and photographer was the most important tool in getting such images.

He said it was absolutely terrifying to be sitting on the small machine on a metal frame added ahead of the pilot — except when there were birds. "When you are with birds, you are not scared," he said.

With the aircraft, the same sort of plane used to lead whooping cranes raised in captivity on migration routes, the cinematographers could be treated as members of the flock. In fact, they trained some birds — including geese, pelicans and swans — by letting them fix on the ultralight as chicks so that they thought of it as an adult bird and would follow it when it took off. These birds were used to lure wild flocks into the air.

The ultralight was not easy to fly, Mr. Perrin said, nor was it always comfortable for filming. Sometimes at 10,000 feet a bird would land on a cinematographer's lap and have to be nudged off with one hand, while he held a heavy 35-millimeter film camera in the other. One rule was absolute: no filmmakers with vertigo need apply.

Ultralight aircraft crashed seven times, Mr. Perrin said, although no one was seriously injured. "If I have a good friend," Mr. Perrin said, "I don't give him this aircraft."

The filmmakers used other flying machines, including a motorized parachute, gliders and balloons. Mr. Perrin said they tried unsuccessfully to use small remote controlled model aircraft. But they succeeded with a land-crawling remotely controlled robot with a camera, which could move, slowly, into a flock on the ground. On water, the teams used boats, including a very large one lent by the French Navy.

"Winged Migration" follows a year in the life of birds in North America, Europe and Asia, in Africa and the Middle East, in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. The film crews went to Iceland and Kenya, Nebraska and Kosovo, Senegal and Greenland, Vietnam, Peru and many other locations.

At times, poetic license was extended. Cinematographers filmed Canadian hunters shooting snow geese, but they also used images of fowl tumbling from the sky that were actually birds doing excited acrobatics as they came to land. In the second instance, the gunshots were added in the studio.

In addition, one shot of birds walking through oil was done on a constructed set. The oil was milk with vegetable color. And in another scene when crabs were attacking young birds, something that occurred naturally, Mr. Perrin said, the filmmakers snatched the young chicks away before the crabs got them and substituted a piece of fish, so that the final feeding of the crabs seen on screen was not actually on a bird carcass.

Nonetheless, Mr. Perrin said, the wild birds filmed were truly wild. They flew when they chose to fly. Sometimes they were lured into the sky by the trained birds, and sometimes they voted with their feet and stayed on the ground. Sometimes they took off when the film crews weren't ready.

The pictures of birds in the air, showing their formations and mode of flying are the most significant for scientists, who can see flight mechanisms at work, and for their beauty.

In Africa, for instance, there are scenes of birds in countless numbers wheeling and turning in unison like an instantly shifting Escher drawing. The images look unreal.

Dr. Henri Weimerskirch of the National Center of Scientific Research in Villiers-en-Bois, France, a scientific consultant on the film, said it appealed to both scientists and nature lovers. "Some people look at it as a great view of the way the animals are living," he said. "Others look at it more as a poem."

Dr. Weimerskirch also did some research in collaboration with the filmmakers. In October 2001 he published a paper in Nature that took advantage of the pelicans trained to follow the aircraft by attaching monitors to check their heartbeats. He showed that they saved energy by flying in formation. He said he would report soon on similar work with swans.

If the movie has more poetry than data, it still satisfies a deep hunger for a certain kind of knowledge: the desire to see. It is hard to observe birds closely in their element, and that is why the market is so good among birders for binoculars and telescopes. In watching the film, no optics are required.

Dr. Weimerskirch said he had been working with birds for 20 years, studying the energetics of their flight. But, of course, he had never flown with them. "It was incredible to be with the animal itself," he said. "There," he said, "you can see exactly how it works."